Education and Public Engagement
The interaction with the public placed a particular importance in our iGEM project. Our aim was to influence the general public by conducting detailed discussions, raising their awareness towards synthetic biology and creating new incentives relating to science.
General public
Information stand in the city center of Erlangen
To give the broader public the opportunity to learn about our iGEM project, as well as to learn about their opinion towards synthetic biology and our project, we organized an information stand with the title “Erlangen meets science” in the city center of Erlangen.
Pedestrians had the opportunity to learn about lab work and biosafety by playing a lab game, win prices (donated by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg FAU and different companies) and try delicious pretzels in the shape of plasmids (donated by local bakery Brezen Meyer).
Also representatives of the FAU visited our information desk and promoted this activity on their Instagram account. This effected that many students stopped by and got to know iGEM competition.
Different posters and discussions with team members gave pedestrians the opportunity to learn about our project, iGEM and the opportunities and risks of synthetic biology in medical and
industrial applications. These discussions and an additional survey offered valuable insight to the public opinion on these topics. 17 pedestrians with diverse professions took part in our survey,
which deals with basics of synthetic biology and biology in general to check the knowledge of the public.
According to the several occupations it can be seen that a large part of the participants were students, which demonstrates that Erlangen has a strong student population.
We wondered, how many participants know about possible work fields of biologists. This issue arises from the existing prejudices, after which all biologists work e.g. as zoologists or botanists. Our survey showed that only approx. 40% of the respondents are aware of the working fields.
According to synthetic biology, we were also interested in the general knowledge about CRISPR/Cas, which is strongly represented in the media, as well as basics like the definition of a gene or synthetic biology in general.
The results of the survey show that around 60% of the public heard about CRISPR/Cas and nearly everybody knows about the definition of a gene. Synthetic biology, which presents a modern field of biology, is not well known, which is demonstrated by the survey.
Attendance at a local high school
To present the essential points of synthetic biology (and specifically our project) to senior students, we visited the local high school Helene-Lange Gymnasium in Fürth.
The participating students were able to learn about iGEM and gather first experience with biologic experimentation techniques, e.g. the isolation of DNA from strawberries. We also offered a question-and-answer session in the end to give the participants the opportunity to express their personal interests. The visit at the school was useful to get an impression of students’ perspectives towards our project.
Coverage in the media
To reach a wider audience, we cooperated with the radio station afk max by contributing to a radio report about our project. Moreover, an editor of the student magazine V-magazine interviewed our team and produced an article about synthetic biology and the work of our team. By presenting our team activities on social media (e.g. facebook), we furthermore ensured higher public attention and increased our reach.
Finally, a self-made 2D animated video clip was produced, in which our work with S-Layers is explained in a comprehensible way on YouTube. This ensures that people with all levels of knowledge have access to the basics of our iGEM project.